Urban Terror 5: The April Update

Hello everyone, we hope you are all doing fine during this time of social distancing and maybe come together by enjoying a few rounds of Urban Terror with your friends from home! 😊

We have certainly kept ourselves busy and used some of that extra free time to bring Urban Terror 5 one step closer with the introduction of a new game mode, but also through the addition of the next batch of alpha testers, who have joined us over the course of last week.

So, what is that new game mode?

At the core of Urban Terror, we strongly believe in the gameplay that everyone has grown to love, moving quickly around the map by circle jumping, walljumps and powerslides. Over the past few months, we have seen an increase of older players coming back, and something that has been mentioned more than anything is just that: the movement.To us, it is important to transport that feeling you know and love to the new Urban Terror 5, and to help us with fine-tuning, we now have the Jump mode in the game (thank you Barbie)!To those who are already familiar with the current Jump mode in Urban Terror 4 this will sound familiar: being able to save and load positions as well as a timer to show off your best times to complete a map, among other features to make it a core game mode in Urban Terror 5.

Speaking of maps, to complement the new mode, we have introduced a short jump map that is now available to all our QA testers.

News from QA

As mentioned earlier, we expanded our team of QA testers. This time around we invited quite a few mappers to the mix to help us test our workflow for creating custom maps. It will be very interesting to see what they are able to come up with, but also see map conversions from Urban Terror 4 to the new engine and help our devs to have more information to work with.

From what we have been told by our longer standing QA team, in the beginning it could feel a little overwhelming, trying to get adjusted to the workflow, but there was a lot of positive feedback. Everyone is really finding their own footing in the project and welcomed all the new people to the team with a testing session only a few hours after they had joined us. Participation is great and we cannot wait to see what is going to happen next, especially with all the ideas for maps!

Let us know your thoughts – Question and Answers!

We realize that there might be some questions that still have gone unanswered. Maybe there is a suggestion you have for us? What would YOU like to see in the future?We will be trying something new in the upcoming days!

During the next week we will be posting to our Reddit (don’t worry, we will remind you!) and that is your chance to have all of these answered. We will pick some of the questions and take the feedback into consideration and answer them in a separate post.Take the opportunity, make your voice heard and support what you feel passionate about!

And finally..

We want to use this opportunity to give a big thank you to OhJay for all the work he has done for us. You helped everyone where you could, and your updates were always engaging. We will miss your drive to push everyone and wish you all the best for your next chapter in life!

Alpha survey now closed

Thank you to everyone that filled out the survey and showed interest in joining our group of alpha testers! The survey is now closed.

It's now time for us to start the process of evaluating the survey results, and with nearly 500 responses hopefully all our testing needs will be met.

From here we will work out who best suits the positions, and then contact people accordingly. There is only a certain number of people needed so we do apologize if you didn't make it - please remember it isn't personal.

As we go through the results the people chosen will be contacted and gradually added as we need them; the people that unfortunately didn't make it will also be notified as a courtesy.

If you want to know more about the development process and you missed OJ's blog explaining a bit about it, click here.

We really appreciate all the people who submitted the survey and are willing to help us test Urban Terror 5. Keep the artwork coming for Battle of the Artists and we'll keep you updated on the alpha.

Urban Terror 5 Private Alpha

We are happy to announce the private alpha stage of Urban Terror 5 has begun! The doors are being opened to our first group of testers as we speak!

As you know for the past 5 years we have been working on updating UrT to run on the shiny new Unreal Engine 4. This means working on the core of the game and making sure all the building blocks are solid and have it feeling like the UrT we all know and love.

We're now at a point where we feel it's time to reach out and get some more people on board to help us test the game. We rarely have time ourselves amidst development and there just isn't enough of us to test the game thouroughly anyway. Hopefully with the start of the private alpha we won't have to worry about that anymore as there are teams that will do that for us - headed by our super guru QA master extraordinaire Slis of course!

Awesome right? Want to get involved?

We have devised a little survey for everyone to fill out. It tells us about the specs of the system you are running and a little bit of your background and motivations for wanting to be involved with this project. We'll go through the submissions and gradually add people to our test groups over the next few weeks and months. You can access the survey here:

Moving Trucks For Urban Terror

Well folks it's time for the moving trucks to arrive for Urban Terror. We have explored several options and finally decided on moving to Unreal Engine 4.

For the last few months we've been working on UDK3 (ie. casa screenshot which was shown on FB and Twitter) in order to "learn the UDK way" and everything done for UDK3 is already done as well for UDK4. You can read all about Unreal 4 at https://unrealengine.com/

This has a lot of advantages for us and our community. We have full access to the engine source code and we will be able to use Steam to distribute the game. As we learn more about UE4 we will keep you posted.

Jump Mode Notice

Jump Mode is planned to have its own gametype in Urban Terror HD. You may have already had a taste of it when you tried out our HD Alpha. Now Frozen Sand has included a second Jump mode: "Team Jump Mode" !

Jump modes:

Jump Training, a kind of free-for-all where each player has his/her own objectives.

Team Jump Mode, more dedicated to competition and teamwork in Urban Terror. Two teams jump against each other with points to collect and the clock to beat.

Our goal is to develop the competition aspect of this game mode for both individual and team play.

Some of the features for these modes:

• Gametype 9 (Jump Training) and gametype 10 (Team Jump Mode).

• Players are invincible, they cannot break their legs or die.

• A cvar g_ghostPlayers (0/1), when activated it will not be possible to "block" other players.

• Crystals to collect, each giving a point.

• Spectators can chat with players in game and vice versa.

• Radio binds are activated for both modes.

• A cvar g_noStamina (0/1) which allows beginners to turn off stamina.

• A cvar g_maxWallJumps (0/100) which allows either to turn off walljumps, or to grant a certain number of wall jumps according to the requirements of a map.

• Start and Finish lines to be placed at the beginning and end of a map.

• A stopwatch which starts as soon as you cross the start line, and which of course stops by touching the finish line.

• Auto-saving of the best time made during the game so you can try to beat your own record time.

• Two cvars /savePos and /loadPos to save and go back to your saved position.

• It is possible to see all players on the minimap (Jump Training).

• A Jump scoreboard at the end of the round with the number of crystals collected, the best time, etc.

• A system of centralised statistics coupled with the authentication system of Urban Terror HD.

Please note that this is work in progress. And we want your input ! You can help us by visiting our forum, and give us your opinion. All suggestions are welcome !